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Joe and Mika, the Odd Couple of Morning TV

EYE OPENERS Mika Brzezinski, left, with her teammate and sparring partner, Joe Scarborough, on the set of “Morning Joe,” their news program on MSNBC.Credit
Michael Nagle for The New York Times

LAST week on the North Lawn of the White House, the morning after the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski held court on the grass, presiding over a special Sunday edition of their MSNBC daily news program, “Morning Joe.” As they sat beside one another in directors’ chairs — Mika in a black evening gown with a plunging neckline; Joe in a dinner jacket (sans tie), both of them wearing dark sunglasses — they exuded the reckless, easy glamour of old-style Hollywood stars: Rock Hudson and Doris Day (but Doris Day with a tan and killer abs).

A few hours before, at the MSNBC after-party, they’d hobnobbed with the actors Alec Baldwin and Bradley Cooper; and as they received guests for the dinner post-mortem (Jon Meacham of Newsweek, Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post, Rick Stengel of Time), Joe teased their younger co-host, Willie Geist, that his sunglasses looked like the BluBlockers from Mr. Cooper’s movie “The Hangover.”

It was hard, for a moment, to remember that these cinematic presences were established journalists and political wonks who spend three hours every morning debating the news of the day with an Elysium of commentators. When their colleague David Gregory flashed onto the screen to give a preview of “Meet the Press,” he stared at Mika and Joe, abashed. “You two do so much to glam up the joint here,” he said. Mika laughed, shook her blond bob and looked over at her fellow anchor. “Glamorous is not the word I think of when I think of Joe,” she said.

Anchors of morning news programs occupy a curious position in the national psyche. They are the faces that Americans wake up to, and as such they need to be welcoming faces — faces that people who have just groggily rolled out of bed would intentionally choose to summon by pressing the on button on their televisions, minutes after they’ve pressed the off button on their alarms. Typically, the anchors are men and women approximating some idealized vision of a reassuring American couple-on-air breakfast buddies. In the ’70s and early ’80s, on the “Today” show, Tom Brokaw and Jane Pauley embodied the new era of two-career households, surrogate parents — warm, professional and earnest, breaking a path. Later, when Mr. Brokaw moved to evening news, Bryant Gumbel and Ms. Pauley built a stable blended family; and when Katie Couric took over as an anchor in the ’90s, she and Mr. Gumbel created a different mood — energetic and competitive, like student council co-presidents with a wary working relationship. On CBS, the affable, avuncular Harry Smith shared the morning (he still does) with a series of attractive, clever “nieces”; while on ABC, for many years, the regal Diane Sawyer and the courtly Charles Gibson imparted the news like benevolent, remote stepparents.

With the attention deficit disorder of the last decade, as channels have multiplied, neurotic networks have dumbed down their morning mainstays in an attempt to retain distractable viewers, cramming the programs with cooking segments, scripted happy talk, interviews with grinning tourists and endless puffy promotional appearances with celebrities — plugging new movies, diets, beauty books and so on. A sprinkling of hard news is thrown in to sop up some of the sugar.

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MY NAME IS Mika and Joe, here with Mr. Geist and Jonathan Capehart, make things simple, working on a first-name basis.Credit
Michael Nagle for The New York Times

This is not the recipe of “Morning Joe.” The banter of Mika, 43, and Joe, 47 (no one ever seems to use their last names) is off the cuff and unrehearsed. So much so that when Mika invited on the editor of Self magazine last month to discuss a new self-help book, “The Nine Rooms of Happiness,” Joe came on at the end of the segment and said, incredulously, “I leave the set for one minute, and we turn into the fifth hour of the ‘Today’ show?” Mika retorted, “Do you have a problem with that?” Joe turned to their fellow host and said: “Nobody can complete you, Willie. Only you can complete yourself.”

When you first turn on “Morning Joe,” for a moment you might think you’re still in the Stepford-ized zone of network breakfast television. Mika is so striking, poised and accommodating; Joe is so alpha. It’s easy to be misled. But once you start listening, you realize this is a new genre: morning-news-romcom-vérité. The hosts’ differences become plain as they riff on the headlines, arguing, flirting and jousting with an energy that can feel more Hot Lips Houlihan and Hawkeye Pierce than Meredith Vieira and Matt Lauer. A classic-rock soundtrack bookends each segment: Doobie Brothers, Bruce Springsteen, Steely Dan and Squeeze, a playlist curated by Joe, who has played in rock bands for decades.

In this parallel universe you’ll also find that the hosts and guests are genuinely, thoroughly, discussing the news, debating it and laughing over its absurdities, hour after hour. Joe is an opinionated conservative, and a former Republican congressman from Florida, while Mika is a (moderate) liberal, and the daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser during the Carter administration.

Joe sometimes enrages MSNBC’s liberal viewers with his Republican attitudes — as in late March, when the health care reform bill was passed, and for a week or so “Morning Joe” took on a Fox News-like partisan air. This is his prerogative; it’s his program. It’s Mika’s prerogative to push back, but she doesn’t always exercise that muscle. Like a diplomatic wife, her instinct is to let him and the other obstreperous guests hold forth, when they are so inclined, and to reprove gently, if at all possible.

On a typical morning, Joe might riffle through newspapers, munching his Danish and slurping his latte like a sleepy Metro-North commuter while Mika leads off with the day’s top story. Mr. Geist will field her pitch, assisted by the columnist Mike Barnicle or the commentator Pat Buchanan; then Joe will join in, and before long, another regular guest, like Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post, will throw out another topic, like reading an angry e-mail message he’d received from Al Sharpton.

Five cameras track the action around the table, avoiding the usual straight-across-the-newsdesk lineup, relaying the spontaneity of a news media dugout bull session. Hundreds of viewers make comments via e-mail during the broadcast.

On a recent April morning, as the hosts and their guests discussed coming Supreme Court appointments and the former New York Congressman Eric Massa’s fall from grace, a viewer wrote in to comment on an earlier subject of the day: Mika’s outfit. She was wearing a daffodil-colored dress, which had provoked Joe to tease that she looked “like an Easter egg.” The viewer wrote, “Mika looks radiant this morning but she does not look like an Easter egg, Joe. She looks like a Peep.”

That morning, Tina Brown, the editor of The Daily Beast, had joined the group. When she entered the studio and complimented the host on her dress, Mika rolled her eyes, glanced at Joe, who was dressed in a fleece jacket and jeans, and said, “We do clash,” and added, “Sally Quinn says you can always tell couples that aren’t working because they dress like they’re going to two different parties.”

When guests like Ms. Brown, or Rudolph W. Giuliani or Doris Kearns Goodwin join the fray, they speak not in sound bites but at length, and at will. “It’s kind of like ‘Car Talk,’ ” Joe says. “We don’t prepare. We don’t play TV.”

Some guests, used to the formulaic structure of other programs, have been confused by the program’s improvisational format. “We had one guest that kept coming on the set, saying ‘What are we talking about today, I didn’t get my talking points?’ ” Joe recalled. “And finally Mika turned to her and said, ‘It’s in the damn newspaper, and if you read it, you’ll know what we’ll be talking about.’ ”

It was three years ago, on May 9, 2007, that “Morning Joe” was first broadcast. Since then, the program’s audience has grown to almost 400,000 viewers, and this spring, it passed CNN’s “American Morning” in the cable ratings (both programs lag behind “Fox & Friends.”) Its highest ratings came in 2008 during the presidential campaign.

That is when Nora Ephron, the author and film director, started watching “Morning Joe,” but that is not why she watches today. “For me it’s not so much about the politics,” she admits. “I tend to watch almost anything like this in terms of: is this romantic comedy? And it is.” The raillery between the hosts reminds her of the political opposites (and off-air husband and wife) Mary Matalin and James Carville, with a telling exception. Ms. Matalin and Mr. Carville, she observes, are “so wildly in disagreement with one another that you can’t even imagine how they can get in the car and drive home together” after they appear on television. “But Mika and Joe, I feel, really like each other,” she says. “I’m very busy thinking about them as a temporary couple on the air.”

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Willie Geist, center, is another member of the program’s discussion group.Credit
Evelyn Laws

It’s clear that MSNBC is strewing as much moondust as they can around their male and female leads, tantalizing the breakfast audience by promoting them as an iconic duo . Between segments on the program, stylized photographs of the hosts appear — the two of them aglow in the morning light, striding down 30 Rockefeller Center canyon; or carousing in a dimly lit bar, à la “The Fabulous Baker Boys.” But when you ask them about their private lives, they gratefully extol their spouses — Joe’s wife, Susan, and Mika’s husband, Jim Hoffer — who understand their gruelling schedules. “Susan and Mika are very good friends, they’re in constant contact and love each other, and Jim is in the business himself,” Joe says.

Hendrik Hertzberg, the New Yorker columnist and editor (who watches “Morning Joe” for its political content), occasionally appears as a panelist, and reads its chemistry a little differently. “It’s just a friendly, family atmosphere,” he said in mid-April, after appearing on the Supreme Court segment. “It’s like they’re your siblings. They feel like they’re brother and sister, with a little incestuous edge.” He added, “I guess they bicker a little bit sometimes, but it’s always warm.” To Mr. Hertzberg, the dynamic is not so much romantic comedy, as “situation comedy, and when you arrive on the set, you kind of slide into a supporting role — the role of a visiting nephew or a distant uncle who’s just in town for the weekend.” He’s struck, he continued, by the natural flow of discussion. “Sometimes you can’t tell whether the camera’s on or off, because the conversation never stops.”

Mr. Brokaw, a frequent guest, also praises the flexibility of the format: “It’s one of the few places left on television in which you have time to say more than two or three sentences at a time,” he said. “I think it’s the best morning talk going at the moment when it comes to public policy.” The program reminds him a little of the “Today” show in the ’70s. “But ‘Morning Joe’ is unique in my experience in that they give you as much time as they do to explore what’s topical.”

The creation story behind this journalistic gallimaufry is worthy of an episode of “30 Rock.” In March 2007, Joe was in Florida, broadcasting his MSNBC program “Scarborough Country” when MSNBC assigned a freelancer to deliver the news segment from New Jersey. That person was Mika, who had worked in the news media for 20 years, and had been abruptly fired from CBS on May 2, her birthday, the previous year. Joe, who had never met her, was struck by Mika’s jesting tone when she signed off, “And now, back to Scarborough Country.”

On a boat the next day, his friends told him, “Dude she’s making fun of your show!” The thought intrigued him. A few weeks later, when MSNBC canceled the “Imus in the Morning” program (after its host, Don Imus, made insensitive remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team), Joe traveled to Secaucus, N.J., with his producer, Chris Licht, to pitch a program to MSNBC’s president, Phil Griffin, to fill the Imus slot. The concept, Mr. Licht explained last month, was, “Hard news for three hours, not formulaic, not focus-grouped, just intelligent people having intelligent discussions about major topics.” Joe wanted to find a fellow host who could stand her ground against him, not a glorified “prompter-reader.”

Sitting on the mini-sofa in Joe’s office at Rockefeller Center, they remembered their first encounter, in Secaucus, three years ago. “I go up to Mika and say, ’Nice to meet you,’ and I said, ‘By the way, I know you make fun of my show.’ ” Mika interjected, “And I said, ‘How can I make fun of a show that I’ve never even seen?’ ” Grinning, Joe continued, “Two seconds later I’m calling Phil and saying I found my co-host.”

On their first broadcast, he recalled, “Mika and I didn’t know each other, but we started talking.” While the stage manager was “counting down 5-4-3-2 — we just kept talking. There was no break between the conversation we were having before the red light came on and the conversation after the red light came on. Mika said in 10 seconds she knew she was hooked.”

Mika said ruefully, “I didn’t want to do morning television,” but she and Joe “have bonded. We love making fun of ourselves and each other, whether its on our political views or our weight ... and that, by the way, could be any type of relationship — sibling, husband, wife, father, daughter — we’re a little bit of everything.”

That borderless dynamic comes through particularly at fraught moments, like the time when Mika was mugged on her way to the Washington studio, and Joe, shaken, scolded Mayor Adrian Fenty (who happened to be a guest), like an over-protective father; or the time last May, when Mika, in a letter to the editor that appeared in The New York Times, defended Joe after an editorial called him a “leader in the Republican attack squad.”

There’s probably no time when their allegiance shows more plainly than when Mika’s father, who seems to regard Joe as an undesired son-in-law, appears on the program, and they both go on guard, radiating anxious respect. “That’s one of the fun things about watching him come on,” Ms. Ephron noted. In December 2008 (a much-blogged-about incident) Dr. Brzezinski called Joe “stunningly superficial” in his assessment of various aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Oh my god, I was dying!” Mika wailed. Joe said, “She called me all weekend making sure I was fine.”

Mika said, “You have to understand, my father is the worst offender in stirring the pot intellectually,”and explained that a lifetime of arbitrating family dinners taught her to “keep the peace.” “On the show, Mika’s nickname is Mommy,” Mr. Capehart said. “Joe’s thing is ‘Mommy’s tired, where’s her Ambien?’ ” According to Joe, “Whenever Mika and I start fighting, Willie will talk about how sad it makes the kids that Mommy and Daddy are fighting.”

He compares himself and Mika to “two quarterbacks on the field that don’t need coaches,” two people who he said can see “what’s going on the field based on the audibles.” And the program’s structure encourages team behavior. Any weekday, from 6 to 9 a.m., five chairs surround the news table in the studio, but a sixth chair sits off-camera; the kitchen chair of whoever is watching at home.

“I think that many, many of the people who watch it are well along in the fantasy of ... ‘I could be on that show,’ — a guest or a regular,” Ms. Ephron said. “The conversation is like some kind of dream sequence at a bar, only you can have a part in it, and it’s in the morning.”